"An absolute
joy, the kind of book you urge on your friends." (Lee
Adams,TheaterWeek)

JACKET
COPY:Before
Beatlemania swept the country, Manhattan nightlife was a
cabaret, and New York City was the land of discovery. Every
few blocks stood a glamorously named boîte – the Blue
Angel, Le Ruban Bleu, the Bon Soir, Café Society Downtown,
RSVP – where showbiz history was in progress. “We never
called them cabarets then,” said singer-comedienne Dorothy
Loudon. “We called them saloons. Toilets. Dives.” Ed
Sullivan, Broadway producer David Merrick, and countless
talent scouts raided these clubs for fledgling talent, and
look who they found: Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Carol
Burnett, Doris Day, Eartha Kitt, Harry Belafonte, Lena
Horne, Lenny Bruce, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Pearl
Bailey, Lily Tomlin, Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, Beatrice
Arthur, Barbara Cook, Johnny Mathis, Liberace, Jerry
Herman, Dick Cavett.
......That
whole wild age comes back to life inIntimate
Nights: The Golden Age of New York
Cabaret, first
published in 1991 and now extensively revised and updated.
James Gavin took traces an era that stretches from the days
of corrosive speakeasy gin (and a singer, Helen Morgan, who
poured out her heart while perched on the piano) through
the genre’s ‘50s heyday, when the field’s legends – Mabel
Mercer, Bobby Short, Julie Wilson, Sylvia Syms, Blossom
Dearie – mesmerized audiences in cozy nightspots. Cabaret’s
wacky renaissance of the ‘70s is here too: a time when
Bette Midler cavorted at a gay bathhouse and Peter Allen
bumped and shimmied at Reno Sweeney. More recently, Harry
Connick Jr., Mira Sorvino, and Nellie McKay have passed
through this still-vital field.
......It’s
all here inIntimate
Nights, which Louis
Botto ofPlaybillcalled
“diligently researched,” “glittering,” and
“outrageous.”Intimate
Nightswon the 1992
Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music journalism.
EXCERPTBY
THE the mid-‘50s, Manhattan’s late-night hideaways were
getting so much attention that dozens of would-be
impresarios were inspired to create their own little nooks.
As Ron Diamond wrote in his liner notes for a Portia Nelson
album: “In every great cosmopolitan city – be it San
Francisco or Paris, New York or London – there are night
spots where the frantic day can be brought to a restorative
end with good food, drinks to hold hands over, and a little
night music … the central ingredient is the after-dark
poetry of musicians with quiet pianos, singers with
persuasive but uninsistent voices, songs that somehow
become as personal as memories.
......One
such haven was the Left Bank, opened at 309 West 50th
Street by Richard Kollmar, husband of Dorothy Kilgallen.
Best known for a morning radio show,Breakfast
with Dorothy and Dick,in which he and
Kilgallen chatted about their fashionable nights on the
town, Kollmar also acted, produced, and ran a small art
gallery. He decorated the Left Bank with paintings from his
collection and with models of human hands, one of his
fetishes. His arty lounge for jazz and cocktails boasted a
slick vocal quartet led by the handsome John LaSalle; one
could also count on some surprise guest appearances,
asCue’s
Tim Taylor reported in 1957: “Each banquette in the
softly-lit room is equipped with a plug into which a table
microphone can be set at a moment’s notice. The night I
dropped in, Judy Holliday obliged with a tune from her hit
musical,Bells Are
Ringing.It made my steak
sandwich taste just a little bit better.
......To
all small-town folk who itched for that sort of excitement,
Manhattan gave off a lot of siren calls. On October 8,
1959, CBS-TV airedThe Big
Party, a
ninety-minute prime-time special about the kind of
gathering that chic New Yorkers supposedly attended all the
time: a soiree thrown by Rock Hudson at the Waldorf, with
Sammy Davis, Jr. tap-dancing on the piano, Broadway’s Lisa
Kirk doing production numbers from her hit act at the
Plaza, and Esther Williams trading bitchy repartee with
Tallulah Bankhead.
......Such
a scene might not have appealed to millions, but its allure
was undeniable, particularly for gays. “People were telling
us we were inferior, and we wanted to feel superior,” said
author Richard Lamparski. “Everyone was trying to pretend
they were sophisticated. That’s ridiculous, in a way. But
at the same time, it meant you had to read, to be
culturally aware. You could only pretend so far, or you’d
get caught. That you could understand Mabel Mercer’s music,
or Bobby Short’s – that was all to the good.”
......Short
figured memorably in theNew
Yorker’s front pages,
which detailed the city’s boundless “Goings-On About Town.”
Rogers Whitaker, the magazine’s nightlife reporter, had
this to say about the emerging prince of the East Side
piano bars: “Bobby Short, a nightingale who has sung in
Berkeley Square, has a brand of heigh-ho that’s impulsive,
upbeat, and alert.”
......The
cover of Short’s 1959 albumBobby Short
on the East Side, recorded in
the bar of the Weylin Hotel, was its own glamorous
invitation to New York. It showed him on Park Avenue,
striking a dance step alongside a Rolls Royce with a white
chauffeur. Both had been loaned by Ahmet Ertegun, the
president of his record company, Atlantic. Inside the
Weylin or any other bar he played, Short started a party
every time he sat at the piano. Shoulders shimmying and
head thrown back, he made life seem like an endless whirl
of jaunts to the Riviera, Havana, and Rio; of nights spent
“slumming on Park Avenue,” swilling champagne and flirting
blithely with romance. With a French-style clipped vibrato
and the occasional rolled r’s of Mabel Mercer, the
Illinois-born entertainer was a total self-creation. But
the society following he cultivated, and anyone else who
wanted to feel sophisticated for a night, hung on his every
word.
......A
child performer in vaudeville, Short had spent years
entertaining in Los Angeles cafés. But theNew
Yorker, which he read
faithfully, had made him yearn “to be part of that whole
East Side milieu,” as he later said. Rough as it was to
sing for his supper in noisy rooms where the cigarette
smoke invaded every fiber of his tuxedo, Short knew he was
where he belonged.
......“Itwasglamorous,
truly,” he said. “There was so much nightlife, so many
places to go. New York was a late place back in those days.
After working in a club you never went to bed; you went
straight to P.J. Clarke’s. There were so many performers
around town, and greatpersonagesthat
you’d heard about for years and years. We had columnists
back in those days – Dorothy Kilgallen, Jack O’Brian. We
also had what was known as High Society.” Before long he
knew many of the composers whose songs he’d sung for years.
Short and Harold Arlen used the same barbershop at the
Lombardy Hotel; Vernon Duke became his close friend and
Cole Porter an acquaintance. It wasn’t uncommon to see
those giants at ringside, grinning up at Short.
......“Bobby
was a pistol in those days – so cute, so full of energy,”
said his longtime pal and peer, Charles Cochran. “He had
more pizzazz than anyone working the lounges. There was a
drum roll, he would be introduced, and he would run on and
play a lot of silly chords, a pounding kind of thing to get
the attention of the room. I think usually he worked his
own lights. These were rooms that were not anything
special, but he was clever enough to do a real show in
them.”
......One
afternoon in 1956, Irvin Arthur, a fledgling talent agent
and young married man, went combing the streets of midtown,
looking for clubs in which he might be able to book piano
players. He walked into the elegantly named RSVP, a
forty-four-seat hole-in-the-wall that faced the Blue Angel.
Inside he saw an inelegant sight. At the end of the bar
stood the owner, Murray Shapiro. “He was three sheets to
the wind,” said Arthur. “Two guys were standing in front of
him and they were pummeling him, hitting in the stomach. He
wasn’t paying his loans from the shylocks. He was crying:
‘I’ll pay you, I’ll pay you!’ They kept hitting him.
......“I
slipped out and went to a phone. I called this guy I knew,
a loan shark, and said, ‘What’s the story with this joint,
the RSVP?’ He said, ‘Whaddya ya wanna know for?’ I said, ‘I
kinda like that club.’ ‘He said, ‘You have
seventeen-hundred and fifty dollars?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He
said, ‘OK, Irvin, you own a club.’
......For
the next four years, Arthur got little sleep. “All I knew
is that Mabel Mercer was looking for a gig,” he explained
almost fifty years later. “I thought this would be a good
room for her.”
......He
called his wife, Sandy, who was employed at a woodworking
shop. “How do we get $1,750?” he asked.
......The
young couple managed to secure a bank loan. Suddenly,
without knowing a thing about the business, they had
acquired a saloon that was small in size but big on
headaches. The liquor license cost thousands. Then there
were the electric bills Shapiro had left unpaid. Sandy
learned of the latter when she showed up for her first day
at RSVP and found the door padlocked.
......“I
went to a telephone booth and called Irv and said, ‘What
the hell are you doing to me?’ I was so angry at him for
getting us involved in this.” She stormed back to RSVP and
yanked the padlock so hard she broke it off. “I walked in
and called him back. I said, ‘OK, I’m in here.’ We opened
that night by candlelight.”
......Irvin
called Mercer and offered her a job. Soon there she was,
seated in her grande-dame chair on a riser near the end of
the bar. Sam Hamilton played the upright piano beside her.
RSVP was no bigger than many New York living rooms, and
much dingier, but Mercer made it a salon for the musical
aristocrats who loved her: Leontyne Price, Peggy Lee, Frank
Sinatra. Such clients were well equipped to pay a cover
charge, but the Arthurs charged their customers none, only
a minimum.
......The
couple weren’t as naïve as they seemed. With dogged
determination, they found ways to keep RSVP afloat. To
liven up cocktail hour, they made the place a gay bar from
five to eight – a brave move, given the police harassment
such enterprises suffered. Sandy invited all the gay
woodworking designers she knew, and on Sunday, the club’s
dark night, she and Irvin promoted it along the “Bird
Circuit”: the gay bars and restaurants with such coded
names as the Blue Parrot, the Yellow Cockatoo, the Golden
Pheasant, and the Swan. With Mercer enthroned there by
night, RSVP had a more respectable air, but Irvin was
surprised at how rowdy happy hour could get as the liquor
flowed: “There was a lot of groping going on,” he said.
......“About
every two months,” recalled Sandy, “I’d say, ‘OK, today’s
the day, I’ll make a scene.’ I’d pick on somebody I didn’t
like and say, ‘You –get
out!’ I knew we
were gonna get in trouble if I didn’t do it.”
......The
police still demanded constant payoffs. “I’d go home,” she
said, “and the bartender or somebody would call and say,
‘Treasury’s here.’ That meant the cops were there turning
the bottles over and saying, ‘This isn’t really Dewer’s.’
Which meant you had to give them five bucks, ten bucks,
whatever.” Sometimes a policeman went into the bathroom,
confiscated the sign that reminded employees to wash their
hands, claimed it was never there, and demanded payment of
a fine. “At Christmas,” said Irvin, “you’d go to the
station, see the captain, see the lieutenant, wish them a
Merry Christmas, and give them cash.”
......There
was plenty of fun to offset the grief. It wasn’t unusual
for Irvin, who still worked by day as an agent, to wake up
to a ringing phone in the middle of the night. The caller
was Sandy, telling him to get dressed and come to the RSVP.
......“What
for? Is there a problem?”
......“No.
Just come down.”
......He
arrived once to find Martha Raye and some of her famous
friends there with Mercer, all of them singing and
laughing. The Arthurs locked the door and, because liquor
sales were illegal after hours, they gave away champagne,
further cutting into profits. Sandy would always regret
throwing away the cocktail napkins that another customer,
Salvador Dali, had covered with sketches; had she kept them
to sell in future years, she and her husband would have
repaid their initial investment many times over. Was the
venture ever profitable? “No,” said Irvin. “Never.”
......It
finally closed in 1960. “The building was coming down,
thank God,” said Sandy. She and Irvin took away the joyful
memory of hosting Mabel Mercer; of luring Mae Barnes from
the Bon Soir to play several engagements; and of presenting
a young cocktail pianist and aspiring theater composer,
Jerry Herman. Running the RSVP, said Irvin, “was the right
thing to do at that point in our lives. We never wanted to
do it again, but we sure had a great time.”

MORE
REVIEWS

"The definitive
book about the golden age of cabaret." (Alvin Klein,New York
Times)

"Via witty
interviews and meticulous research, [Gavin] conjures
long-forgotten, big-personality impresarios, singers,
comedians and drag queens so vividly you can almost taste
their sweat and tears." (Raven Snook,Time Out New
York)

"Lovers of
cabaret will be grateful for every tidbit he offers."
(Jonathan Yardley,Washington
Post)

"A fascinating,
often witty, and always entertaining history of cabaret ...
a book no one interested in cabaret should fail to read."
(Barbara Leavy,Cabaret
Scenes)

"An exhaustive
and deliciously detailed history ... There is simply no
more authoritative source about who did what, where."
(David Noh,Gay City
News)

"Doubly
compelling for its depth and humor." (Paul Colford,New York
Newsday)

"An evocative
paean to a beautiful but vanished era."
(Newark
Star-Ledger)
"Fascinating and compelling ... It's a highly diverting
story, which Gavin keeps moving siwftly by quoting inside
stories from those who were on the scene." (Max
Preeo,Show
Music)

"Entertaining
and touching." (Nancy Nicholas,Mirabella)

"The book has a
dishy anecdote on almost every page." (Jacques le
Sourd,Gannett
Westchester Newspapers)

"It paints the
ambiance of legendary clubs like Le Ruban Bleu, the Bon
Soir and the Blue Angel so strongly you'll feel like you
are there." (John F. Karr,Bay Area
Reporter)BONUS
FUN ...